Dr. Jason Fung

It's going to make you more hungry.

Your basal metabolic rate is going to go down.

This was one of the big myths of intermittent fasting.

That's going to cause the so-called starvation mode, right?

And this is the idea that your basal metabolic rate will fall so low that when you do start to eat, you're going to gain weight again.

So I said, well, let's think about this.

You can do a study where you take somebody, say you, for example, and you could fast them for four days.

and measure how many calories they're burning, their basal metabolic rate on day zero before the fast, and measure them four days into the fast and see how many calories you're burning.

So on day zero, they say you're burning, say, 2,000 calories a day.

On day four of zero food, you don't eat any food for four days.

They measure how much calories you're burning.

Your body is burning 2,200 calories.

your basal metabolic rate didn't go down.

It went up.

Your body's activating itself during fasting, which is fascinating because if you're trying to lose weight, dropping that basal metabolic rate is death.

Like if you drop that metabolic rate, it's so hard to lose weight.

That's what the calorie restricted diets did.

That's what the low fat diets did, the eating all the time did.

But when you actually fast, your metabolic rate went up.

And we see this in study after study.